Strange things can happen when people ask themselves a question and are unwilling to let go of it. Some retreat into seclusion to ponder the meaning of life. Some waste hours reading ultimately unrelated content on Wikipedia. Some spend way too much time writing marginally (if that) useful solutions to their questions. In this post, I’m guilty of that last one, though I’ve also been known to do the Wikipedia thing. My question? “Hey, if how could I find the largest files and subdirectories in this directory?”

Today, I wrote a quick and dirty script to query FND_PROFILE tables to get information about a log file I found on an E-Business Suite app tier. Not particularly revolutionary, but on the off-chance that it helps someone, I’m sharing.

While working from home this evening, I had to download some patches to a remote Linux system, and was struck, not for the the first time, by the inconvenience of it all. So I wrote a quick shell function that helps me grab patches using wget. And then, I decided to share with the world, or at least the really small portion of the world that visits my blog.